A Taste of Honey
by Experimental
Summary: In which, during a day at the zoo, the host club discovers that Honey is nature's candy. Inspired by the Herb Alpert ditty.


A Taste of Honey

Haruhi blamed herself.

She might have let it slip during host duties that some of her fondest childhood memories were of going to the zoo with her father—an innocent slip to be sure, but not something one did within earshot of the other members of Ouran's host club. Especially if the slip came from someone in as lamentable a position as hers, and in particular if the person who happened to catch it was Suou Tamaki. This was just general knowledge.

So it really came as no surprise that a few weeks later, on a bright and warm Sunday morning, she should find herself staring at a bunch of penguins, who were staring right back at her from what was someone's pitiful idea of what an iceberg was supposed to look like, sweating. Would it really have been a stretch if she had said that she found herself feeling a sense of kinship with those penguins?

For it was just at that moment that her clubmates came bouncing up to her—

"Haru-chan! Haru-chan!" Honey was singing.

"Haruhi-i-i—" (that was Tamaki) "—do you know you can feed the elephants at this place?"

Haruhi sighed. "Yes."

Predictably enough, he deflated. Somewhat. "Oh. How long have you known?"

"Everyone knows that, Sempai."

"Huh." And he promptly perked back up. "Let's go feed them, then, okay?"

"Really? Can we feed the elephants?" Honey echoed, tugging at the hem of her shirt.

"Yes, can we, Haruhi? Can we, can we, can we?" the twins (wherever they had come from) chimed in.

Mori and Kyouya just watched patiently from the sidelines. A lot of help they were.

Which deserved another sigh. "I don't see why you guys have to ask me first if you can do anything. You're all adults—well . . ." Haruhi paused. Best not to even go there, she ended up telling herself. "You're old enough to make your own decisions, anyway."

"Yeah, but do _you_ want to feed the elephants, Haruhi?" Tamaki wanted to know.

Her other three interrogators crowded in close for the verdict. Why, oh why, she asked herself, did it always come down to this? "Sure, I'd love to fee—"

"Yay!" Honey shouted, jumping into the air. "E-le-phants, e-le-phants! I get to feed the elephants!"

Which was more or less expected from him, as he never went anywhere without his Lolita boy persona.

Whom the same reaction was not expected from, however, were Tamaki and the twins, who—judging by how even the small children who passed by them stared and shook their heads—probably should have grown up sufficiently by now to check their obnoxiousness . . . not necessarily at the door, but at least enough not to start doing touchdown dances in front of the penguin exhibit.

Sometimes she wondered how Kyouya stayed sane.

"Come on, Takashi," Honey was saying in the meantime, bursting into sparkles, "let's go get in line!"

"Uh-huh," Mori said unenthusiastically, and allowed himself to be led by the hand in the direction of the elephant exhibit.

So they went, and much fun was had by all inside the exhibit, feeding the elephants carrots and radishes and marveling at the feel of their trunks as the animals sniffed their hands looking for more eats.

Except that the same could not _exactly_ be said for Honey, for it was at about that point when the day really took a turn for the bizarre.

"Well, that was fun!" Tamaki exclaimed as he patted his hands against his pants. "What do we want to see next?"

Honey laughed out loud. Tamaki took a quick look around the group and counted only five other faces beside himself. Then his and all their heads turned to look back at the elephants, where they quickly discovered the reason behind Honey's laughter.

Tamaki gaped. Haruhi started and the twins recoiled slightly. Kyouya raised an eyebrow behind his glasses. Mori . . . Well, no one knew just how Mori was reacting on the inside because it never showed on his face.

And what had caused this reaction from the host club, one would be slightly more than tempted to ask?

It was the particular attention one of the elephants was currently paying Honey. Or perhaps it was better to say, the _peculiar_ attention she was paying him. Despite him having no more food to offer her, an old cow was suddenly nonetheless very interested in Honey's arm, and she sniffed it very intently.

Honey, of course, misread the gesture completely. "Oh. Do you want some more radishes?"

"Uh, I'm not sure _radishes_ are what it wants . . ." the twins said, hanging warily back.

"Honey-sempai, get out of there!" Tamaki stage-whispered, extending a hand toward his upperclassman, but Honey was completely oblivious.

The elephant didn't give a lick about another radish. She was obviously much more interested in Honey, as was evidenced when she slid her trunk nonchalantly around the back of his neck, like some smooth operator pulling the old yawn-and-stretch move, and wrapped it around his shoulder. And . . . was that a come-hither look in her big, doe eyes?

Honey just giggled and scrunched his neck. "Hey, that tickles! My, but you're a friendly one, aren't you?"

Friendly was not exactly the word Haruhi would have used. As the rest of them stared, they were pretty sure that right about the time the elephant started playing with his hair like it was hay and smiling dumbly at him like some lech, they would have been so out of there. Even Mori was visibly uncomfortable.

But Honey, only a bit flustered by the attention, otherwise seemed to think it was the greatest thing ever. He was nothing but polite to the elephant, asking it nicely to beg his pardon when they finally managed to drag him away.

Prudence would have stepped in at about this point and told them the elephants had been about enough of a hands-on wildlife experience today, thank you very much. But this was the host club. "Prudence" was mysteriously absent from their dictionary.

Because what was the first thing Honey wanted to do when they exited the elephant exhibit, but go next door and feed the giraffes.

Does it really need to be said what happened next?

There the host club was, waiting on the balcony overlooking the savannah and holding vegetation out for the giraffes, when one after another the club's members were ignored without so much as a second glance—as one after another the giraffes found whatever Honey was offering to be much more interesting.

At first Tamaki and the twins stared jealously at their upperclassman, wanting to know what kind of freakish Dr Doolittle powers he had been concealing all this time to be so popular with the animals. But then it just got ridiculous, and downright creepy, when he had three giraffes lined up taking turns, not to pluck some leaves from the branch he was holding out them, which went almost completely untouched, but to lick his hands.

Naturally, out of all of them, Honey was the only one who didn't seem to find something disturbing in having three very long, very strong, and very blue tongues lapping at him. He seemed to think—as he told Mori when Mori asked him if he was all right—that they were just the sweetest animals.

Tamaki's index finger, which had narrowly escaped being nipped off, could have disputed that.

For the rest of the morning, Honey was on the proverbial roll. Wherever they got close enough to the animals for them to get a good whiff of him, they were on him like . . . well, like Honey on a bakery display case, actually.

Wherever he went, adorableness followed him like his shadow. It got to the point where Mori's reputation for wildness was in serious danger of being usurped by a Lolita boy. At one exhibit after another, Honey was assaulted by insulin-inducing displays of animal love. The list of offenders included: a tiger cub who preferred his thumb to a bottle of baby formula; a touchy-feely chimpanzee who was bound and determined to make Honey her sugar daddy; a rather amorous couple of lovebirds; and a very content, _very_ stubborn tree python.

One would have thought that the host club would have surely learned their lesson by then, but no. After the reptile house, they walked unthinkingly into the free-flying butterfly house as well, where it took all of forty-three seconds (Kyouya counted) for Honey's head and shoulders to be liberally blanketed in exotic butterflies of all shapes and colors and sizes. His uncanny habit of exuding almost tangible blossoms of bubbliness when excited was not helping matters any, either. Needless to say, it was only through a truly impressive feat of maneuvering on the whole group's part that they were able to get Honey out of there without smuggling a piece of the exhibit along with him.

"Finally!" Haruhi and the twins sighed some time later, when they sat down around an outdoor table beside a cafe inside the park. Lunchtime could not have come soon enough for the host club, who were exhausted from dragging Honey away from one reluctant creature after another all day.

"If I had known what was going to happen if we took Honey-sempai to a zoo," Haruhi said as she unwrapped her tuna sandwich, "I would have been a lot more careful not to say anything that might give Tamaki-sempai the impression we should go."

She and the twins turned and glared at their host king.

Who was completely oblivious to the notion that he was at all complicit in what had happened. "I know! It's weird, right?" he said, staring at them with eyes wide. "What has he got, some sort of animal telepathy?"

Hikaru rested his chin in his hand. "More likely he put his hand in bacon grease or something before we came, the little cheater—you know, like thieves do when they want to placate guard dogs."

"Then how do you explain herbivores being so interested in him?" Kaoru asked his brother.

"Oh. Good point."

"Nope! You guys have got it all wrong," Honey said as he struggled to open a package of vanilla pudding. "There wasn't anything on me but me!"

Tamaki leaned forward. "Okay. Then how do _you_ explain it, Sempai?"

Honey didn't. The lid of the pudding came off faster than he was expecting it, and a bit of pudding went flying and hit him on the cheek.

"Mitsukuni, you've got a little . . ." Mori said as his classmate sat there blinking. He swiped up the pudding on the tip of his thumb and put it in his own mouth.

"Oh. Thank you, Takashi." Honey beamed.

Mori paused. Lowering his thumb from his lips, he turned the pudding over on his tongue like he was contemplating the flavors of a piece of fine cheese. Something wasn't right, said the intrigued look in his usually stoic eyes.

Then he turned and licked the side of Honey's face where the pudding had been.

Honey screwed his face up a little at that. But otherwise, he didn't seem to care about anything other than his now-opened pudding.

The hosts, on the other hand, could do nothing but stare in disbelief at what they had just seen Mori do. Tamaki, for one, looked positively scandalized, and not just because they all knew where Honey had been all day. As the sputtering noise that he was making roughly translated into: Had Mori just licked Honey's cheek? As in, with his tongue? And didst his eyes deceive him, because he couldn't have been the only one who saw that, right? Right? Naturally, some explanation was in order.

Which Mori presently offered them.

A slight smile on his lips, he observed simply: "Sweet."

Honey just continued to beam, because _that_ was something he had known for a long time.

And that was how the host club came to learn that Honey was nature's candy.

—o—

End.  
_Armistice Day, 2006._


End file.
